10 ms·

So much of the most comfortable housing stock in America is single-family "McMansion" type homes. The type of suburban detached house that likely the majority o

So much of the most comfortable housing stock in America is single-family "McMansion" type homes. The type of suburban detached house that likely the majority of middle-class American millennials grew up in. For a young adult in the current economic climate, the only way you're living in one of these cushy homes is if you're living with your parents. You can't rent one very easily, since they can't be divided up into multiple units or rented at all due to zoning and HOAs. Not to mention it's not typical to be a renter in these neighborhoods to begin with, so even finding a rental is nearly impossible in some areas. Then of course, after the housing bubble crashed and the subsidies went away, a mortgage for one of these became a big challenge to achieve, and who has the savings sitting around for upkeep and emergency maintenance? Boomer parents, and a handful of lucky gen-xers are pretty much the only people who could comfortably acquire and hold onto these houses, so it only makes sense that sticking to them like glue is the best strategy if you wanted one. And there's also the fact that it's just not cool to live in the 'burbs, where you grew up, in the first place. The mental justification has to be "well I'm saving money at least". Saving money, means crashing with the parents. After all, it's "just temporary". Those are at least my very subjective observations that might be overlooked in that study...

Kluny 10y ago
It's more than uncool. It means giving up a huge portion of your life to commute to work, to your kid's school, and to the grocery store. It's definitely not coolness that keeps me living in a neighborhood where I can walk to the grocery store and to work. It massively increases the hours of my life.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Priorities differ. Furthermore, not every job is in SOMA--or even in the Bay Area. Many tech jobs are in exurban areas an hour or more from the nearest metropolitan area. You can certainly choose not to work at one of those companies, but it limits one's options.
  - Kluny 10y ago
    I don't live anywhere near SOMA. I live in Canada in one of the ten or so "tech cities" where one can reasonably get a job as a programmer.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Which is fine. But, at least in the US, many of the even "urban area" tech jobs are not within a city's public transit system etc. Personally, I work for a tech company which is about an hour outside of the local major city and that's pretty typical of many of the major tech jobs in the area.
    - turar 10y ago
      There are ten tech cities in Canada? I thought there were like ten cities in total. :)
      - Kluny 10y ago
        Some of them are more like tech villages.
        escape_plan 10y ago
        I am considering moving to Canada from Silicon Valley, any suggestions?
        Kluny 10y ago
        Victoria is wonderful if you can afford to pay a shocking amount of money for a condo/house or tolerate living in student-grade housing well into your thirties. Otherwise, Kelowna is a beautiful town with more reasonable cost of living, a good urban core, terrific weather, and easy access to some top-notch nature.
        escape_plan 10y ago
        Nice, thanks for the info. I am also considering good school and educated community areas in Canada, I saw MoneySense report and it seems Ottawa is a good place (ah weather I know), it seems Kelowna (Saw it mentioned before also) suits the bill here.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- MajorLOL 10y ago
  It's a lifestyle choice. Personally, I like restoring old cars, remodeling my home, building robots. I couldn't do any of these things without being already wealthy if I lived in a big city, within walking distance to the grocery store and work. I gladly commute so I can come home to something more than an apartment or condo, because that is all that is available or affordable.
  - RickS 10y ago
    > restoring old cars, remodeling my home, building robots. May I ask what city/neighborhood you're in? I'm looking to escape from San Francisco to do that exact list of things.
  - Kluny 10y ago
    That does sound like a nice life.
- tropo 10y ago
  That long commute only happens when you live outside of the expensive coastal city, but insist on working there. I can probably drive to all those places (work, school, grocery) faster than you can walk to them. Had I been willing to live on a street with cars passing by, I could have been within a few hundred feet of work+school or the grocery store. As it is, they are all within 3 miles without really any traffic. Getting to work is 3 minutes. Getting to groceries is about 7 minutes, and I can actually bring back enough stuff for a large family. School would be 1 or 2 minutes. Oh, as a bonus, I never face the threat of personal crime.
  - dionidium 10y ago
    No, you face a worse threat: automobile accidents http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts-chart.aspx http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts...
- 1872397523 10y ago
  For some people, spending most of your life in a polluted, noisy, shitty apartment is giving up more life than the commute to work. It is unfortunate that we have to make such terrible choices.
mevile 10y ago
> the subsidies went away If you're talking about being able to claim mortgage interest on your taxes then that hasn't gone away yet. I don't know what other kinds of home owner subsidies exist.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  I've never understood why people make such a big deal out of that deduction. It doesn't add up to very much in my experience - not enough to make it worth considering in one's decision about which house to buy, much less one's decision about whether one can afford to buy a house at all. If you're relying on the mortgage interest deduction to make homeownership affordable, you.... well... it's going to really hurt the first time an appliance breaks or you have to call the plumber or whatever. Better to keep renting.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    For most people middle class and higher it lowers the effective interest rate by a third or more. That's a much lower interest rate and changes the math a lot.
    - marssaxman 10y ago
      Hm. I guess it doesn't matter to me because I bought at a time when the interest rate was practically nothing anyway (my mortgage is at 3.5%). I can see how it would have been a big motivating factor for people in my parents' generation, who are of course the same general class of people who would have been trying to convince me that the mortgage interest deduction was a big deal.
  - dionidium 10y ago
    I've never understood why people make such a big deal out of that deduction The reason is that this, like nearly everything else in this thread, only applies to the coasts or for houses that would be considered quite expensive elsewhere. The median home value in St. Louis, for example, is less than $150k. The standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly is $12,600. The math is pretty simple from there.
majormajor 10y ago
> For a young adult in the current economic climate, the only way you're living in one of these cushy homes is if you're living with your parents. This is a very coastal/urban-centric view, IME. The large majority of my social circle growing up in suburban Dallas (a) still lives in suburban Dallas and (b) found a detached home before age 30 (if not 25). I moved away from the suburbs, and to a big coastal city, and so did almost "everyone I know" out here (with a lot of selection bias), but judging from that and housing prices in those crazy markets doesn't work for extrapolating to the country as a whole. Of the ones still living at home, I don't know anyone thinking "it would be just as cool to have my own place, so might as well save money." The causality is reversed: "I'm broke, so might as well save as much money as possible, and my parents' place is big." "Not cool" starts being a lot less relevant pretty quickly after getting out of college for most people, IME. Suburban houses are bigger than apartments. They're less noisy. They're more pet friendly. You have a garage for storage/workshopping/whatever. You have more space for starting a family. All those reasons still apply as much as they ever did, the big change from ten years ago to today is economic, not around coolness.
- Rumudiez 10y ago
  Keeping in mind that a large portion of these people live in areas outside of Dallas, with the average home price only several hundred grand above $150k[1]. In the greater Seattle area you'd be stressed to find a back alley condo for that cheap. My rent in the outskirts of Redmond for a 3 bedroom apartment is more than my mother's mortgage for her 5 bedroom house in Bellevue, which, despite being a 70 year old split-level home with low ceilings and a hill for a lot in a forgotten neighborhood without so much as one sidewalk, was appraised two years ago for over $750,000. I can afford to live on my own, but hell if I can afford a reasonable down payment on a house within 25 miles of where I work. 1. http://www.zillow.com/dallas-tx/home-values/ http://www.zillow.com/dallas-tx/home-values/
  - dionidium 10y ago
    Well, right, which is why the parent said it was a "very coastal/urban-centric view." What he's describing about Dallas is true for the nearly 200 million Americans who live in the Midwest and the South. Cheap housing is the norm in the United States. I'm not bothered by people on the coasts complaining about housing costs, but you look foolish when you make generalizations about your generation that don't apply to the majority of the country.
prawn 10y ago
I wonder if many project builders have tried promoting plans that make a larger house easier to compartmentalise either for separate living for teenage kids, or to sublet to someone else? e.g., separate entrance and main rooms, perhaps shared but lockable laundry, etc.
- yardie 10y ago
  That would be called in duplex in most cases. I think they don't because then you get into multi dwelling zoning and if the property was zoned for single-family homes it could get complicated (probably not by much).
- arebop 10y ago
  Christopher Alexander talked about that in A Pattern Language, and the New Urbanist architects talk about/design for/build it quite often (the usual solution is the "carriage house" or "granny flat" but more generally the idea is to restrict zoning to address patterns of activity in public spaces, thus legalizing more variation in demographics and behaviors across time and short distances). It does not really fit into the mainstream (suburban) scheme of fastidious homogenization of uses and forms.
- rwhitman 10y ago
  It's all about profit for the builder in relationship to municipalities and their zoning codes. Municipalities that were mostly formed around the time of the suburban building boom instituted very strict zoning and regulations around density, subdividing properties, adding in-law units etc. Fast forward to today and in all but a few very progressive communities, the fear of changing these zoning laws negatively impacting property value has essentially frozen them in time. So in a lot of suburban areas you couldn't build separate living units on one single family lot, even if you wanted to. Or at least it would be quite costly. For instance my brother-in-law is a planner in a suburban California city, discussed this once with him... apparently in his city you need to add 2 additional parking spaces for every extra housing unit added to your property. Want to make an in-law unit for grandma? 2 parking spots please. Don't have room for an extra driveway? No permit. Basically unless new construction was zoned to be a higher-density area, for apartments or townhomes etc, for a developer it doesn't make much sense to build with extra units in mind. Especially if the builder has to put up a fight for permits or spend that much more money to meet code. In that case, it's more profitable to just be building condos.

Kluny 10y ago

It's more than uncool. It means giving up a huge portion of your life to commute to work, to your kid's school, and to the grocery store. It's definitely not coolness that keeps me living in a neighborhood where I can walk to the grocery store and to work. It massively increases the hours of my life.

ghaff 10y ago
Priorities differ. Furthermore, not every job is in SOMA--or even in the Bay Area. Many tech jobs are in exurban areas an hour or more from the nearest metropolitan area. You can certainly choose not to work at one of those companies, but it limits one's options.
- Kluny 10y ago
  I don't live anywhere near SOMA. I live in Canada in one of the ten or so "tech cities" where one can reasonably get a job as a programmer.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Which is fine. But, at least in the US, many of the even "urban area" tech jobs are not within a city's public transit system etc. Personally, I work for a tech company which is about an hour outside of the local major city and that's pretty typical of many of the major tech jobs in the area.
  - turar 10y ago
    There are ten tech cities in Canada? I thought there were like ten cities in total. :)
    - Kluny 10y ago
      Some of them are more like tech villages.
      - escape_plan 10y ago
        I am considering moving to Canada from Silicon Valley, any suggestions?
        Kluny 10y ago
        Victoria is wonderful if you can afford to pay a shocking amount of money for a condo/house or tolerate living in student-grade housing well into your thirties. Otherwise, Kelowna is a beautiful town with more reasonable cost of living, a good urban core, terrific weather, and easy access to some top-notch nature.
        escape_plan 10y ago
        Nice, thanks for the info. I am also considering good school and educated community areas in Canada, I saw MoneySense report and it seems Ottawa is a good place (ah weather I know), it seems Kelowna (Saw it mentioned before also) suits the bill here.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
MajorLOL 10y ago
It's a lifestyle choice. Personally, I like restoring old cars, remodeling my home, building robots. I couldn't do any of these things without being already wealthy if I lived in a big city, within walking distance to the grocery store and work. I gladly commute so I can come home to something more than an apartment or condo, because that is all that is available or affordable.
- RickS 10y ago
  > restoring old cars, remodeling my home, building robots. May I ask what city/neighborhood you're in? I'm looking to escape from San Francisco to do that exact list of things.
- Kluny 10y ago
  That does sound like a nice life.
tropo 10y ago
That long commute only happens when you live outside of the expensive coastal city, but insist on working there. I can probably drive to all those places (work, school, grocery) faster than you can walk to them. Had I been willing to live on a street with cars passing by, I could have been within a few hundred feet of work+school or the grocery store. As it is, they are all within 3 miles without really any traffic. Getting to work is 3 minutes. Getting to groceries is about 7 minutes, and I can actually bring back enough stuff for a large family. School would be 1 or 2 minutes. Oh, as a bonus, I never face the threat of personal crime.
- dionidium 10y ago
  No, you face a worse threat: automobile accidents http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts-chart.aspx http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts...
1872397523 10y ago
For some people, spending most of your life in a polluted, noisy, shitty apartment is giving up more life than the commute to work. It is unfortunate that we have to make such terrible choices.

mevile 10y ago

> the subsidies went away If you're talking about being able to claim mortgage interest on your taxes then that hasn't gone away yet. I don't know what other kinds of home owner subsidies exist.

marssaxman 10y ago
I've never understood why people make such a big deal out of that deduction. It doesn't add up to very much in my experience - not enough to make it worth considering in one's decision about which house to buy, much less one's decision about whether one can afford to buy a house at all. If you're relying on the mortgage interest deduction to make homeownership affordable, you.... well... it's going to really hurt the first time an appliance breaks or you have to call the plumber or whatever. Better to keep renting.
- CPLX 10y ago
  For most people middle class and higher it lowers the effective interest rate by a third or more. That's a much lower interest rate and changes the math a lot.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    Hm. I guess it doesn't matter to me because I bought at a time when the interest rate was practically nothing anyway (my mortgage is at 3.5%). I can see how it would have been a big motivating factor for people in my parents' generation, who are of course the same general class of people who would have been trying to convince me that the mortgage interest deduction was a big deal.
- dionidium 10y ago
  I've never understood why people make such a big deal out of that deduction The reason is that this, like nearly everything else in this thread, only applies to the coasts or for houses that would be considered quite expensive elsewhere. The median home value in St. Louis, for example, is less than $150k. The standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly is $12,600. The math is pretty simple from there.

majormajor 10y ago

> For a young adult in the current economic climate, the only way you're living in one of these cushy homes is if you're living with your parents. This is a very coastal/urban-centric view, IME. The large majority of my social circle growing up in suburban Dallas (a) still lives in suburban Dallas and (b) found a detached home before age 30 (if not 25). I moved away from the suburbs, and to a big coastal city, and so did almost "everyone I know" out here (with a lot of selection bias), but judging from that and housing prices in those crazy markets doesn't work for extrapolating to the country as a whole. Of the ones still living at home, I don't know anyone thinking "it would be just as cool to have my own place, so might as well save money." The causality is reversed: "I'm broke, so might as well save as much money as possible, and my parents' place is big." "Not cool" starts being a lot less relevant pretty quickly after getting out of college for most people, IME. Suburban houses are bigger than apartments. They're less noisy. They're more pet friendly. You have a garage for storage/workshopping/whatever. You have more space for starting a family. All those reasons still apply as much as they ever did, the big change from ten years ago to today is economic, not around coolness.

Rumudiez 10y ago
Keeping in mind that a large portion of these people live in areas outside of Dallas, with the average home price only several hundred grand above $150k[1]. In the greater Seattle area you'd be stressed to find a back alley condo for that cheap. My rent in the outskirts of Redmond for a 3 bedroom apartment is more than my mother's mortgage for her 5 bedroom house in Bellevue, which, despite being a 70 year old split-level home with low ceilings and a hill for a lot in a forgotten neighborhood without so much as one sidewalk, was appraised two years ago for over $750,000. I can afford to live on my own, but hell if I can afford a reasonable down payment on a house within 25 miles of where I work. 1. http://www.zillow.com/dallas-tx/home-values/ http://www.zillow.com/dallas-tx/home-values/
- dionidium 10y ago
  Well, right, which is why the parent said it was a "very coastal/urban-centric view." What he's describing about Dallas is true for the nearly 200 million Americans who live in the Midwest and the South. Cheap housing is the norm in the United States. I'm not bothered by people on the coasts complaining about housing costs, but you look foolish when you make generalizations about your generation that don't apply to the majority of the country.

prawn 10y ago

I wonder if many project builders have tried promoting plans that make a larger house easier to compartmentalise either for separate living for teenage kids, or to sublet to someone else? e.g., separate entrance and main rooms, perhaps shared but lockable laundry, etc.

yardie 10y ago
That would be called in duplex in most cases. I think they don't because then you get into multi dwelling zoning and if the property was zoned for single-family homes it could get complicated (probably not by much).
arebop 10y ago
Christopher Alexander talked about that in A Pattern Language, and the New Urbanist architects talk about/design for/build it quite often (the usual solution is the "carriage house" or "granny flat" but more generally the idea is to restrict zoning to address patterns of activity in public spaces, thus legalizing more variation in demographics and behaviors across time and short distances). It does not really fit into the mainstream (suburban) scheme of fastidious homogenization of uses and forms.
rwhitman 10y ago
It's all about profit for the builder in relationship to municipalities and their zoning codes. Municipalities that were mostly formed around the time of the suburban building boom instituted very strict zoning and regulations around density, subdividing properties, adding in-law units etc. Fast forward to today and in all but a few very progressive communities, the fear of changing these zoning laws negatively impacting property value has essentially frozen them in time. So in a lot of suburban areas you couldn't build separate living units on one single family lot, even if you wanted to. Or at least it would be quite costly. For instance my brother-in-law is a planner in a suburban California city, discussed this once with him... apparently in his city you need to add 2 additional parking spaces for every extra housing unit added to your property. Want to make an in-law unit for grandma? 2 parking spots please. Don't have room for an extra driveway? No permit. Basically unless new construction was zoned to be a higher-density area, for apartments or townhomes etc, for a developer it doesn't make much sense to build with extra units in mind. Especially if the builder has to put up a fight for permits or spend that much more money to meet code. In that case, it's more profitable to just be building condos.